Happy day!

Yesterday I had a wonderful day out, I travelled to my friend Val's house and then we went on to Lingfield, to the Craft Barn for their Open Day. It was a long way but the journey was really worthwhile, I had a wonderful time and I learnt so much from the demos that I watched. My only regret was that there were not enough hours in the day to see everything:). The first demo that I watched was by Beatrice Neumeister who creates the beautiful Katzelcraft stamps. Beatrice was really helpful and friendly (as were all the demonstrators) and between her English and my French I enjoyed wathcing her creating fabulous backgrounds with Distress Inks to showcase her gorgeous stamps. One of the things I picked up from her is to mix and match Nestie frames, I am going to ty to be more adventurous, instead of framing an oval with a scalloped oval. Of course this is a great justification to buy more Nesties... LOL!

Here I used a Nellie Snellen frame that I've owned for a while, and used foam pads to pop it up above the layer behind it. Also picked up from another crafter: add another layer of card when using the Nellies to get them to cut more cleanly - yes it worked!

The cute stamp is Charlotte Ketto, a Stampinbella, Emily had come all the way from Canada and was demo-ing her stamps. I like the Stampinbellas but they didn't call my name - until I saw the cards and samples that Emily had and also another of the demonstrators that is! I now have a long wish list for these:). I've coloured Charlotte with watercolour pencils and Copic on her face as well as some Stickles in her hair.

The DP is Basic Grey Kioshi, which is great for Papertake's Challenge this week. As ever, Dawny P's sketch is a lovely one to use, they have an optional theme of using lilac and lemon this week. Sentiment is Papermania. I'm also entering this for Stamp Something's Happy Challenge.